90 - A Brief History of Ideas

couple options. And first of all, you can go to the Mythic Mind Patreon shop and you can enroll in just this course. However, if you're interested in more than one course that I have to offer in the next year or so, then you'll be better off purchasing a Tier three annual membership to Mythic Mind, and that is the apprentice level, and getting that Tier three annual patronage will give you access to all courses that begin within

that term. And so this currently includes a Brief History of Ideas, plato Stoicism until we have Faces, the Elder Scrolls and Philosophy, and the Soulmarillion, which begins the beginning of twenty twenty six. So again, if two or more of there's interest to you, then your best deal is going to be to get that annual patronage and also give you ad free and usually early episodes of Mythic

Mind and the various things that patronage includes. And so you have a limited time here because again that deal with the Tier three patronage applies to any courses that begin within that term, and so if you want to take full advantage of that, then go ahead and do that right now. But all right, for now, let's go ahead and get into the introductory video for a Brief History of Ideas. Hello, and welcome to a Brief History

of Ideas. I'm doctor Andrew Snyder, and I'm really glad to be leading you on this study over these next six weeks, whether you're joining one of my independent courses for the first time or even with me since we began with the fiction and Philosophy of C. S. Lewis. I'm really excited about sort of where things are going as I'm really focusing right now on the broader model of my course offerings. I'm focusing on building a community

of people that will indoor together across multiple courses. This is why now, Well, people can still enroll in a singular course if they want to. I've moved to this model of really encouraging people to take a more comprehensive approach of purchasing an annual Tier three patronage, and then with that I give them any course that begins within

that term. And so my hope here is that we get this ongoing community and that we all continue going further up and further in together, rather than simply in isolated pockets here and there. And so that being said, I appreciate you being part of this community. Today, I want to just tell you a little bit about what this course is and what you can expect. You probably already know from the title and just from the outline of the course that this is essentially an intro to

philosophy kind of course. In fact, this is something of a concentrated form of what I might offer on a fifteen week basis on campus when I teach intro to philosophy, although it is a very different dynamic here and that obviously I'm not giving you assignments you have to do, and also they're just a different dynamic when you know I'm teaching, I don't know, thirty sixty ninety students who have to be there versus you who chose to be here.

That adds a new dynamic. And so even though it's a shorter time period, we can probably go perhaps a little bit further with the material and with the conversations. And so we'll be taking a look at major topics of conversation within the great conversation of the Western philosophical tradition, going from ancient Greece to the Medievals, to the moderns and to the postmoderns and the postmodern era in which we currently find ourselves. And there's really there's a lot

of value in doing this sort of study. For one thing, it gives better context for the world in which we

live right now. You know, I just alluded to this great conversation that's happening over time, and I think that's a good way of framing the epics of philosophical thought in that you know, whether you study philosophy or not, you probably heard the word postmodernism, and so you already know that whatever this era of philosophy is that we're currently living in, well it's a response or it is directly related to modernism, right which came before it, and

then of course modernism in turn has a certain relationship with the medievals, who have a certain relationship with the ancients. And so this world in which we currently live is but part of this green conversation. And if you're going to really understand what's being said today, you need to

know something about that broader context. And so my hope is that in this study that you'll be able to better understand what is happening today in the significance of the ideas that you've probably heard your entire life, but you know, maybe that in all entirely registered as to it's just how significant some of these ideas are, how jarring they are, how much of a break they are from the millennia of ideas, the millennia of years of

ideas of discourse that's come before them. You know, I run to this a lot with my students, who who being raised within this postmodern climate, are conditioned to believe that, you know, really, all things are just subjective. There's no such thing as truth, there's no such thing as goodness as beauty, that these are all power plays or social constructs, or they come down to nothing more than an individual or even maybe communal opinion. But that's all that ideas

come down to. It's mere opinion. When I start saying that, well, what if there actually is a reality, and that we don't contextualize reality within ourselves, maybe we can even contextualize ourselves within a reality that stands above and beyond any of us as individuals. I say something like that, in many of them, maybe even over half of them, will act like they're hearing something for the very first time. You know, a fish doesn't know that it's wet because

it spends this whole life in the water. And so there's there's a lot of value in studying what people have said in different eras, not because everything they said is right and everything that we say is wrong, but there's value because two heads are better than one. So yeah, you can look at the ancients and say that they've made some mistakes, but they're not the same mistakes that

we're making today. And we can also recognize, I think, if we're reading them carefully for being them honestly, recognize that they got a lot right that we've lost along the way. CS Lewis makes this point in his introduction to Athanacius Is on the incarnationation, or you can also find it. I think a lot. It's like the value of reading old books or something like that in other collections.

But Lewis makes this point that old books aren't necessarily better. However, the ideas, the books, the texts from antiquity that have survived today are probably the ones that are worth holding onto. They've been sifted through time, and so we can look back at the history of ideas and see what stands out over time in a way that we can't with the ideas that are supposedly new and innovative and creative today.

So there's just so much value in getting this other perspective of other eras that were based off different presuppositions and that we're trying to achieve different ends and we tend to be today in our postmodern world. And so you'll be able to better understand the world than what you live. Also, you'll be able to better recover these elements of wisdom that have been left behind by the

mainstream movement of ideas, of academic discourse and whatnot. And also, more than any anything else, I hope that through this study we all grow in our love for wisdom. That's what the word philosophy means phileiosophia. It's the love of wisdom. Philosophy at its root isn't about a knowledge of ideas in a purely intellectual sense. That you know, when Plato

talks about philosophy, he means a love of wisdom. As much as he is a rational kind of thinker, you know, we're going to find that more than anything else, he is driven by love. He is a philosopher of love, and all true philosophers are because we love wisdom. We want our lives to be conformed to the demands and

the beauty and the goodness of wisdom. And so this is not only an intellectual exercise, but exercise of cultivating the right habits and cultivating the right appetites, because we do all have appetites, and some of them are good in accordance with nature, by which I mean that they're going to lead us to the fulfillment of our form what human nature is supposed to be. But of course we also have other appetites that are going to lead

us in the direction of the beastly. And we'll talk more about that dichotomy, especially in ancient thought, in the coming videos and discussions. But the point is that we need to learn discernment. We need to learn the call and to use language of proverbs to hear the call of lady Wisdom over the call of lady folly. And they sound very they sound very similar at first, and so you need that discernment. You need to cultivate the right kind of love so that you are able to

recognize the appropriate voice and respond appropriately. And so there's so much value intellectually, existentially, there's so much value in studying philosophy, and I hope that a lot of that will come through through our studies over these next six weeks. Now, before we get into the flow of the course, I think it'd be helpful to give you just some basic

vocabulary regarding the study for philosophy. I'm not going to overwhelm you now with a bunch of different terms, but I think that some of these major ideas, especially these major branches of philosophy, would be helpful. And so at the center you have philosophy, philosophy being the love of wisdom. Now,

off of that you have a few branches. And exactly how these branches are labeled and constructed, I mean, it depends on who you're talking to, what book you're reading, But the general at least consensus regarding the major studies major branches of philosophy. On one hand, you have epistemology. Now, pistemology is the study of truth. It asked the question what is truth? And how do we come to know it?

You know, is true something that we can reason to can we engage in speculation and logic in order to arrive at truth? Is truth something that can only be understood through sense, experience and through scientific investigation? Like these are the questions for pistemology. Ultimately, what is truth? How do we come to know it? Next, we have ontology, not think we've viewed with oncology. Ontology is the study of being or the study of existence, and ask the

question what is existence? What kinds of things exist? And off of this we can branch off into a couple of major territories. On one hand, we have physics, right,

the study of physical things. Now, why it seems kind of odd to put physics within the domain of philosophy, but I mean this is classically how it's been understood that what we call science, the study of the physical world, used to just be referred to as natural philosophy, because there's this idea that philosophy being this unifying field of wisdom,

that this is the mother science. Well really, I mean, if you're the medievals, theology is the mother science, right, and then philosophy is its handmaiden, and so underneath philosophy as the general love of wisdom. Now we yet, I mean anything that we can study, anything that we can approach, especially through reason, and that includes natural philosophy, includes physics the physical world. Right, Aristotle has a book called the Physics, and so on one hand, we have physics that the

study of the physical world. And you know, I think this is actually really important that we reclaim natural philosophy, that we reclaim science for philosophy, because a lot of times science gets treated as if it is philosophy all in its own. You know, people say, trust the science. You know that I listen to science. My philosophy is science.

But the problem is that science isn't equipped to do things like tell us how to live what the physical sciences do, or they tell us things about the empirical world. They tell us what is regarding the physical plane, But then we have to apply other things like ethics, to determine what we ought to do with it, how we ought to live. That there's no scientific experiment whatsoever that can tell you how to live. All it can do is give you data which then you utilize within your

broader philosophical system. And so science is not a philosophy. Science is an empirical tool that is used within the study ofosophy, and so we need to reclaim it here. And so I think this is pretty significant that we

maintain physics as part of ontology, which is part of philosophy. Now, the other domain which is going to take more of our attention is metaphysics, and that is that which transcends the physical realm, that basis whatever exists that isn't physical, And this can include ideas play doos certainly think so that things like justice actually exist even apart from their physical instantiations, that beauty actually exists, and so ideas can

be metaphysical realities. Angels and demons can be metaphysical realities. Certainly, things like the existence of God is a metaphysical concern. And in Aristyle rather Aristyle has a book on metaphysics as well, and we'll be looking at that in week two. And so we've got physics, we've got metaphysics, and that's all part of ontology. And then the other major branch that I want to bring out here is axiomogy. Sometimes people just call us ethics, but I think it's better

to treat ethics as a sub branches. Who get axiology. With axiology is the study of value. What are the things that we value? What should we value? And that shouldness? I mean that really comes down two ethics. Proper right ethics is the question of what is the good? What does the good life look like? How ought we to live? And then the other major branch here of axiology would be esthetics. And this is, of course the study of beauty. What is beauty? Is beauty objective? Is it real? Does

it make demands on us? Or is beauty simply in the eye that beholder as we tend to say in our post modern context today. I can tell you that, at least for the most part, in the ancient world, they're not going to say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I mean, yeah, you have your your relativist, you have your sophist, and we'll talk about them, but for the most part they believe that beauty is something real, and that the path of wisdom requires the

discernment to cultivate the right affections. That way you're able to recognize or respond to its call. I think a good way of getting at this is to consider the difference between the muses and the sirens. So the muses are the daughters of Zeus that inspire truth and goodness and beauty in the craftsmen and the poets and the artisans and whatnot. And so the muses inspired beauty. And what beauty is is beauty is what draws the soul toward what is good and true and life giving. That's

what beauty is. It draws the soul toward it is true and was good and was life giving. Of course, that presupposes that there is such a thing as a good of human nature, something that we ought to aspire to. And beauty is what summons us up to that goal,

that teilos that purpose that end. Now contrast that you have these sirens, the sirensho are really these monsters, but they would cast out these beautiful, these apparently beautiful songs across the seas that would enrapture unwitting sailors filling them with euphoric visions of the greatest desires and summon them to their location on the islands. And so then the sailor would follow this call, this apparent beauty, until they crash their ships on the rocks and then we're consumed

by the monsters. The sirens here stand for seduction, which we tend to think of in sexual terms, and it absolutely can take that manifestation. But seduction is really just counterfeit beauty. It's anything that has the appearance of beauty but doesn't pull our souls, our psyches, our minds toward what is true and good in life giving. No, it draws our souls toward what is faults in life consuming. And so there are muses and sirens all around us,

and we know that to be true. We all know we have certain affections for things that we shouldn't have affections for. We can all think of times in our lives where to follow the call the siren over the meuse. And so this viewpoint that beauty is actually something real, like there's certain things we ought to be drawn to, and there's certain things that we ought not to be drawn to. In that the right cultivation of virtue or cultivation affections leads us to be drawn by the right things,

the things which are indeed truly beautiful. That even though that framing of beauty it's very different than how we tend to talk today, where everything is subjective. I think if we're honest with ourselves, it makes a lot more sense. And in my experience, most people believe that makes more sense. You know, whenever I do this in one of my classes, you know, I'll start off by asking the students what is beauty? And most of them are going to say

something about it. It's in the eye of the beholder, its opinion. It's entirely subjective. But once I lay things out this way and say, look at your own life, do you really think that everything you're drawn to is actually beautiful? And you can be that simple like, oh no, I guess not. And so a lot of what we need here just to be disenchanted a little bit with the postmodern mindset and recognize that are our souls hunger for the real and we live as if the reel exists.

And if we can cut through a lot of the propaganda that we've been bo against the reality of human nature, then it actually makes us more real. It makes us recognize our reality, and that gives us strength, It gives

us purpose, and it gives us significance. And it's kind of significance that can be scary at first, because what it means is that what you do actually matters, and that's kind of intimidating, but also it's emboldening because now what you do actually matters, and there's joy and contentment to be had there in striving to fulfill our form as humans. Well, there's my broad introduction to philosophy. Now for this course. The way this is going to run

is every week I'll upload some videos. I'll have usually one just really short introductory video that sets up the text that you're dealing with, just very low level introduction. And that's because I'm not going to give you a lot of historical context. Now, I'll sometimes i'll bring in or actually I'll often bring in some other ideas and other philosophers at play that we're not reading, because I think that's going to often be significant for what we're doing.

But I'm not going to give you a whole lot of historical context. I'm not going to go into a lot of things that you could just google and find out easily enough. I really want to suspend our time

in the text together. That's our focus, that's certainly my focus, and so I'll provide just a short introduction to the text that we're dealing with that week, and then I'll provide one or maybe more extended videos that deal with some major topics in the text, depending on just what seems to make sense to me based off what we're reading. I might do a few shorter videos on, you know, one on each of the texts that we're reading. I

might do something more comprehensive on all of them. But my recommendation is that you watch the intro video that I post, do the reading, and then watch the extended videos, because I think that there's a lot of benefit in

just going head ahead with these great philosophers. And by great, I don't mean that they're all necessarily good, even though most of what we read I think it's gonna be pretty good, but I mean significant, and it's helpful just to jump right in and for you to go through struggling on your own to figure out what's being said here before having a guide. I personally find that very helpful.

Some of my best philosophical discoveries, the best exercises. My philosophical reasoning came through reading a difficult text, you know, late at night. Expressive coursing through my veins is trying to figure out, like what is being said here. That's especially true when I was working on my doctoral dissertation on gearkey Guard that you know, he's not an easy to read, especially some of his more difficult texts that I was working with, But just pushing through and then

looking for a guide I find it's often helpful. But even still, I'm not going to be exhausted by my videos. I'm going to give you some I'll give you some frameworks for I think getting hopefully a little bit more out of your reading after you've already done so, and then we'll have our weekly Zoom meetings to discuss together.

Just questions you have, thoughts you have, and you know wherever, you know wherever that goes, and if you've been through one of my courses before, then you know roughly what that looks like. And to me, that's the most enjoyable and probably the most profitable part of these courses. Though of course I hope my independent content is helpful for you as well. All right. So that's basically how this course is going to run. I look forward to where we're going with it, and I look forward to meeting

with you very soon. All right. Until then, God speak, all right. I hope you enjoyed that, And if you did, again, go ahead and enroll today as the course is just about to start, as this is getting posted, and I hope that you'll consider becoming an annual Tier three patron. That way you can continue to move with us from study to study and just join part of this robust,

growing community. I'm really excited about where mythic mind is headed, and I'm grateful that you and like minded or at least like inter listed people are coming around and helping me to continue moving us in in bigger and greater directions.

And before we go, I want to thank all my current patrons, and by name, I want to thank all Tier three patrons and higher, most of whom by this point are taking advantage of that annual deal and so many things to Mark, Amanda, Chase, Chaz, Christopher Clinton, David, Aaron Hevy, Jamie, Justin, Justin, Kyle, Paul, Roger, Ross Tyler, and William. We have a great group that's growing up around these studies, that's growing around, honestly, the various things

that Mythic Mind is doing. We're moving all kinds of really exciting directions, and I hope that you'll consider being a part of that. Find that link in the show notes, Patreon dot com slash Mythic Mind. I hope to see you there, and until next time, godspeed,